Baratunde Thurston

O/C He’s a writer, activist and comedian…on a remarkable journey…..This week on Firing Line

 

My parents gave me an extraordinary name: Baratunde Rafiq Thurston

 

His 2019 Ted talk on deconstructing racism has been viewed millions of times and received widespread acclaim. 

 

My mom just wanted me to have difficulty boarding planes in the 21st century

 

Baratunde Thurston grew up in DC…. His father was killed when he was just 6….and he went on to attend elite academic institutions.

 

And then she sent me in the seventh grade to the private Sidwell Friends School, where U.S. presidents send their daughters and where she sent me looking like this…

 

Over the years, he’s used humor to broach difficult topics…

 

I make a lot of reparations jokes. It makes folks uncomfortable. And I love that. I think that’s hilarious. 

 

…as the digital director for the satirical news publication The Onion, and as a producer for “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” He’s now a founding partner at the digital startup Puck and a sought-after voice for his cultural commentary. Plus, his PBS travel program, “America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston” just launched its second season. What does Baratunde Thurston say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Stephens Inc. Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Kathleen and Andrew McKenna Through The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation and Damon Button. 

 

INTERVIEW

HOOVER: Baratunde Thurston, welcome to Firing Line. 

THURSTON: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here, Margaret. 

HOOVER: Standup comedy, digital media, best-selling author, successful podcast, a PBS series based on the outdoors. What’s the through line for you that connects the various pursuits you’ve been involved in? 

THURSTON: The through line is how do we get to the future? And the through line is my mother. My mom was a computer programmer. My mom was a community organizer and a politically active person. My mom was very black, as am I. And my mother was an avid lover of the outdoors and our connection to nature. 

HOOVER: Arnita Thurston was your mom’s name. 

THURSTON: Yes. 

HOOVER: You describe her as a pro-black, pan African, tofu eating hippie who had me memorizing the countries of Africa and reading about apartheid before my 10th birthday. How did she shape your ideas? 

THURSTON: With love and high standards. She shaped my ideas with a lot of exposure. I remember noticing my friend’s parents, who had very specific ideas of what the parents wanted their kids to be. My mother never said, ‘be a doctor, be a writer, be an actor.’ But she did sign me up for everything, not always asking me first. So she signed me up for Boy Scouts. She signed me up for Taekwondo. She signed me up for the Youth Orchestra program. And through exposure, she shaped my ideas. 

HOOVER: So you’re a New York Times bestselling author The book you wrote was a satirical memoir. 

THURSTON: Yes. 

HOOVER: How to Be Black. 

THURSTON: Bing

HOOVER: You write, quote, “my version of being black adheres as much to the stereotypes as it dramatically breaks from them.” Tell me about your version of being black. 

THURSTON: It keeps evolving. My version of being black right now is focused on how to heal beyond being aware of the traumas of being black. My version is focused on how to find joy and this elusive concept of freedom, which for a lot of my life has been an external appeal to others to recognize me. And quite recently, I’ve come to the obvious conclusion that that is not a path to freedom. But it took me decades and decades of running down that path to realize it’s pretty unsatisfying. 

HOOVER: What precipitated that awareness for you? 

THURSTON: Fatigue. I think 2020 meant a lot of things to a lot of folks around the world, especially in this nation with respect to COVID directly, but also what COVID revealed. And in terms of the racial dynamics of the United States and who was on the front lines, and George Floyd, and countless others whose names we no longer so easily remember, there was a shocking awakening of pain, pain that I was already aware of but that moment, stripped of my ability to travel around and distract myself, was very sad. It was very sad. I found myself to be very, very exhausted. I’d already written the book, How to Be Black. I’d already done a big TED talk about how to end racism. Apparently not enough people watched it. And so here we are reliving this same psychodrama of our sort of unhealed wounds of the nation. And that precipitated a lot of inner work, a lot of gardening and fighting with squirrels over tomatoes in my backyard. A lot of long conversations with my wife, a lot of quiet, forced contemplation due to being locked in my house by regulations or at least recommendations. And in that silence, I started hearing something else.

AMERICA OUTDOORS

HOOVER: Well, once you got outdoors, you took a PBS series to the outdoors. 

THURSTON: Yes. 

HOOVER: America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston recently started its second season.

THURSTON: Yes! 

HOOVER: You travel across the United States: Georgia, Oregon, Maine. And you explore how nature shapes American life and Americans’ relationship with the outdoors. You say your goal as a storyteller is to, quote, “tell a better story of us.” How do you do that? 

THURSTON: With great difficulty. First, I acknowledge that we are living in fragmented stories of me and you that separate us from becoming us. And I think from our political leaders to some of the business language we use to pop culture, we are isolated from each other. The algorithms do it too. And this show has helped a lot. It’s helped me see the country and feel the country, touch and even taste the country and not just think about or have opinions about the country. It’s really different to be with all the difference in this country in the same boat, on the same trail, with someone else. So I’ve gotten to see the country and its beauty and people’s connection to land and nature in a really direct way. The other thing that helps tell the story of us is just reminding myself that we are a ‘we.’ That we’re stronger when we’re together. That individualism has such an important place, but not the only place in our identities. And when we work together, we go farther. And when we try to do everything by ourselves, we end up alone. 

HOOVER: Has it been healing for you? 

THURSTON: Directly. There’s been– the show is far more emotional than I ever understood it would be. I’ve hung out with veterans and people recovering from substance abuse disorder who use the outdoors as a direct path to healing their minds, healing their psyches, healing their bodies. And in the collective sense, black folk who’ve been through so much on this land, indigenous folk who’ve been through so much on this land. The outdoors isn’t always a fun, happy place. It can often be a site of torture and crime and mayhem. But we have a right to it and we have an opportunity to restore that connection to a way that’s much more positive and more healing. So I’ve witnessed collective versions of healing for big groups of people who are taking back their place with nature. 

HOOVER: You’ve called climate change the uninvited co-star.

THURSTON: Yeah, climate change shows up in every episode and it doesn’t demand any kind of payment, but it demands to be heard. 

HOOVER: In Maine, you went out with ice harvesters… 

THURSTON: Yeah. 

HOOVER: …who had found their supply had been greatly reduced, discovered big changes in oyster and lobster industries. What do you hope the audience takes from the program? 

THURSTON: Ohh. That I do my own stunts. [laugh] I also hope they take away a number of things: how beautiful this country really is, physically, humanely, beautiful. You see the landscape. You see the wildlife. You see the people in the landscape with the wildlife. It’s a really beautiful picture and it’s an image of ourselves we don’t often see. I want people to take away that nature is a part of us, not apart from us. And there are so many different ways to restore that lost connection. And I want people to really take away something positive and hopeful. I think most of these episodes leave you feeling better than when you started. There are hard stories in some of them, but we’re mostly focusing on people who’ve created this positive connection where often there was none. And when it comes to something like climate, we’re finding a lot of solutions. We’re visiting regenerative ranches in Oregon. I didn’t know what that was until I went there. So we have a role to play in healing this whole planet, which also helps heal us. I want people to take a lot from the show, apparently. 

HOOVER: One of the episodes you meet with an Iraq War veteran who is treating his post-traumatic stress by immersing himself in nature. 

THURSTON: Yeah. 

HOOVER: What is your observation about how nature can heal us? 

THURSTON: Nature is in a constant process of healing. So it’s a natural role model, no pun intended. But we move through with a tractor or a trail and nature bounces back, or some predator comes through and drives off a herd and they come back, or a storm comes through, there’s – we’re not always the cause of the interruption, but nature is this cyclical thing and it wants to live. Like, life finds a way. Jurassic Park, remember that back in the day? It’s true. And so when I’m feeling broken or beaten down, defeated or hurt in some way, nature is a friend. Nature is a role model. Nature is a path that I can look to. So that’s one way. The other is more direct. Nature feels good a lot of the time. And I felt that. Nature literally heals. There are herbs and plants that can stop bleeding and help with wounds. We’ve known all this. Nature is a medicine cabinet. I think we’ve gotten, I know I’ve gotten, so accustomed to the modern world and all of these layers between me and nature, physical and metaphorical, that I can forget that we come from this. So it’s home. It’s sometimes rough. And I don’t like poison ivy as much as the next person does, but it’s there for us. 

HOOVER: There’s the natural component. But then there’s also this component where you are walking with and experiencing people who come from fundamentally different cultures than you’ve inhabited. People who know your biography know that you grew up in the 1980s in Washington, D.C., that your own life was touched by gun violence. And then you spend time in Arkansas, trapshooting in New Mexico, shooting turkeys, experiencing Americans who have fundamentally different relationships with firearms than perhaps people who grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s. 

THURSTON: Yeah. 

HOOVER: Has this experience helped heal cultural divides for you, or can it? 

THURSTON: It has helped. In that spirit of me going out on a shooting range in Arkansas, or on a turkey hunt in New Mexico, or on a crab boat in the Chesapeake Bay, or on a ranch in Idaho with people who I know explicitly are very, very different from me with a different ideology and a different politics, is a really healthy exercise. Because we don’t start with the talking points. We start with hello. We start with ‘welcome.’ We start with what are we here to do? We have a little micro moment of a story of us right there. I’m here to learn from you. And you know who I am, and you still invited me. So you’re here to share and learn from me as well. So cultural divides, really big concept, really big words. And there are reasons we have such huge ones, but we also have opportunities to close them through relationships. And a lot of us don’t have those relationships. And this show has given me even more of a privilege to explore beyond the talking points where other people are coming from. 

HOOVER: So take something specific like firearms. What did you learn about sportsmen and firearms and the relationship people have with guns in this country that maybe you didn’t know previously? 

THURSTON: I learned, or relearned, that it’s a lot of fun.

NAT “Yay! You did it!”

THURSTON: I had fun. I was learning. I was getting good. I love validation. So when you know Kayleigh Browning, a US silver medalist in sport clay shooting, said you did a good job there. I’m like, I did a good job. Yay! And the little, you know, A-grade seeking student in me is very pleased with himself. So in that sense, yeah, I got some validation. It was also fun to be outside in that way. And I remember feeling like, oh, I’m in nature doing this. And I was aware of how different I felt versus standing on a city street corner. I learned about the deep amount of respect that all kinds of hunters, and I put people who fish in this category as well, have for the lives of animals.

HOOVER: Have you found that connecting with others who are different with you can help you bridge political divides, cultural divides? 

THURSTON: I think it can bridge initially psychological divides. 

HOOVER: Yeah. 

THURSTON: And just the idea that I might not have anything to say to a person from over there or down there or out there is thrown out the window the moment we share a moment of laughter, a smile, eye contact. Then it’s another person. They become another person, and hopefully I become another person too. I think with the Arkansas moment, with Kayleigh and Anne Marie de Amos was the other person I was with who’s on the Game and Fish Commission, we talked about my history with gun violence. My father was shot and killed when I was a young child. They were telling me they had not had that experience so close to them. They don’t know people for whom that’s been true. And we had follow ups, me and Kayleigh, after that. I don’t know that we’re on the same page, but we are closer in the book. And it wasn’t just me who felt some opening. So did she. And we both were like, Oh, I didn’t, I didn’t know that. I didn’t see it that way. I’ve never experienced that myself. And we just, it was valuable for both of us, I know, to see someone hearing us. And a lot of what gets in our way is everybody wants to talk and nobody wants to hear. And it’s very easy with distance to do that.. So, again, this is one of the blessings of the show… 

ELAINE, ARKANSAS MASSACRE

HOOVER: You had to go to Elaine, Arkansas –  

THURSTON: I had to go to Arkansas. And in Elaine I found something else completely mind altering and heart rending to be honest with you, in terms of the history of that town. 

HOOVER: Well, I want to ask you about that. I mean, you, you found, there was a massacre in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919…

THURSTON: Yeah. 

HOOVER: …that had been completely written out of history. How did you stumble into it? 

THURSTON: I have a really good team around me. I can’t pinpoint who found this story exactly how. But I do know it was a shock. I wrote a book called How to Be Black. I know a lot of black history things. It’s part of the job. I’d never heard of Elaine and this massive race massacre that went down in 1919. 

HOOVER: So what happened in the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919?

THURSTON: It’s known as the Red Summer, summer of 1919, very bloody. Lots of towns in this country had white uprisings to crush black progress in one way or the other. In Elaine, a group of sharecroppers had been organizing to demand better payment for their labor. Plantation owners sent a little delegation of armed dudes and shots were fired. Sheriff comes, rounded up a posse, encouraged the whole town to lay waste to the black part of town, called up the governor, claimed it was a black insurrection. 500 federal troops come in by train bearing a Gatling gun, a very automated firing weapon of its era, essentially a machine gun. And they train those weapons on the black part of town. Homes destroyed, babies killed. So the estimate is 200 to 1000. 

HOOVER: Why is it so easy for us to have forgotten so many of these events? 

THURSTON: Because we set up systems to make it hard to remember. 

HOOVER: Like…

THURSTON: …because we erased it. So in this case, in this town, the white leaders of the town made it very clear to the remaining black residents, you don’t ever speak of this or it’ll happen again. Add shame to that. Why would you talk about losing so much like this? So fear and shame. Fear and shame will have us forget a lot of who we are and what we’ve been through. 

A.I.

HOOVER: I want to turn to technology now. 

THURSTON: Let’s go. 

HOOVER: At the Aspen Ideas Festival this year you led an AI workshop.

THURSTON: Yes. 

HOOVER: And you introduced it with this video. Take a look. 

DEEP FAKE VIDEO: Welcome techno adventurers and curiosity connoisseurs. I’m Baratunde Thurston, your tour guide on this digital safari into the wilds of artificial intelligence.

HOOVER: Okay, so now it’s time for the big reveal. That was not you. 

THURSTON: No, that was definitely not me. 

HOOVER: It was a deep fake version of you. 

THURSTON: With my consent, that a friend of mine named Peter made for me. 

HOOVER: But the script and the voice and the video were all generated by A.I.. 

THURSTON: That’s correct. 

HOOVER: What are the consequences of AI’s ability to be able to fake you? 

THURSTON: Yeah. Part of what is happening and will continue to happen with these generative A.I. technologies is that our ability to trust the information around us will decline. Because we will have convincing facsimiles of reality produced not in our best interest or the interest of the truth. So part of the value of that demonstration was– it’s clearly not quite there yet. You see what I sound like now, and that was not it. But in months, maybe years, certainly no more than that, that could be a near-perfect replica. And so part of the reason I did that workshop was to inspire thought about A.I. through direct experience, And then when we see something like that, we get to ask ourselves, what do we want to do? How do we want to govern and restrict and regulate this? Do we want to allow this at all? In some cases, there’s fun and useful applications of things like that, and others it will most certainly undermine our civic fabric and our ability to self-govern and live together. 

HOOVER: Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, have signed a letter saying we should slow down the investment and the work and the progress on artificial intelligence. Where do you come down on this idea? Should we slow it down? Can we slow it down? 

THURSTON: We can slow it down. And I do think it’s important for ‘we the people’ to reassert our agency and our role in the world that we want to live in. We are not just consumer victims of the market, and a handful of geniuses who bestow trinkets upon us at their whim. So I don’t really have much patience for the idea that, well, technology is just going to technology. You can’t slow it down. We have powers here. We have and need to have consent and control and some compensation in some cases for these AI systems for how they affect us. 

FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY

HOOVER: One of your major themes is citizenship. 

THURSTON: Yeah, 

HOOVER: You have this podcast, “How to Citizen.” Citizen is an active verb. 

THURSTON: Mm hmm.

HOOVER: In 2021 after the attack on the Capitol on January six, you said of our country, quote, “We’re just people capable of anything. We’re capable of turning this democracy into a theocracy or an oligarchy or an aristocracy or an authoritarian regime. And we can become Hungary. We can become Russia.” As you look ahead to 2024, to the next presidential election, how do you assess the risks to our democracy? 

THURSTON: They are high. I don’t have a number. I don’t have a rating or a score, but they persist. January six was not the end. It was another milestone in a possible trajectory. I still more firmly believe it’s up to us. And I don’t think there’s any foregone conclusion that we are going to become Hungary or we’re going to become Russia. I think we are at a very key moment to actively decide. It’s up to us. What do we want to become?

TRUMP

HOOVER: How do you assess the risk to democracy of a second Trump presidency? 

THURSTON: I think the risk to democracy of a second Trump presidency is extraordinary. I think he and the people who are rewarded by him having power have made it very clear that they don’t appreciate the voice of the people. There’s a lot of demonstration that, at least while they are in power, they’re very interested in concentrating more and more power and not allowing the checks and balances of the system that we’ve grown to admire and try to make more perfect, run as it should. So, yeah, I think it’s a big threat. 

HUMOR

HOOVER: In 1967, William F. Buckley Jr. hosted Groucho Marx on this program, on the original version of Firing Line. His very first question to the great comedian was, Is the world funny? [laughter] Watch Groucho Marx’s answer. Take a look.
 

MARX: No I don’t think it’s terribly funny, no. I don’t think it’s ever terribly funny. Sometimes there are isolated pieces of the world that are funny, but generally it’s a pretty serious world, always has been. 

HOOVER: What’s your answer to Buckley’s question? Is the world funny? 

THURSTON: I laughed out loud when I heard the question because I thought about this funny little caterpillar I saw when we were out filming America Outdoors, and it had these beady red antenna, and it was the cutest, fuzziest thing. And it clung to the car. And I’m driving like 50 miles an hour and this caterpillar’s just clinging on for dear life. And that made me burst out laughing. I think the world’s hilarious. I think nature’s funny. I think most humans are funny. I think I’m funny if I let myself loose a little bit. So, yeah, I think the world is actually quite a funny place, though I respect his answer about the serious nature of things. 

HOOVER: But you disagree with Groucho Marx. 

THURSTON: I do. I’m willing to go on the record. I disagree with Groucho Marx. The world is hilarious. 

HOOVER: How do you come to your comedy? 

THURSTON: Initially, through anger and disappointment and a need to make sense of something that felt like it didn’t make sense. So I would find the absurdity in a thing and lean on that to explain what I was seeing. 

HOOVER: So comedy is also a way it sounds like, for you to get to the harder truths. 

THURSTON: It’s a way of making sense. Yes. It is a way of explaining it as a way of understanding, and a way of surviving. 

HOOVER: You write in your book also it’s a way of getting at difficult issues like race. 

THURSTON: Yeah. 

HOOVER: How did you use comedy to get at race? 

THURSTON: Oh, man. I make a lot of reparations jokes. It makes folks uncomfortable. And I love that. I think that’s hilarious. But the way that I think about comedy and race and how I’ve done it is, for me, the comedy’s a way to build a relationship. Even a silly little joke, if two people are laughing, those two people agree with each other for a moment. And it bypasses the appropriate part of the brain sometimes. Like, I feel like I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but oh, you got me. And so there’s a channel open between two folks in that moment of laughter. And so what are you going to slide into that channel? 

HOOVER: The series is, “America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston.” Thank you for joining me on Firing Line. 

THURSTON: Thank you. I survived the Firing Line. 

HOOVER: You survived. 

THURSTON: This was such a pleasure. Thank you. 

HOOVER: Thanks.